Well the winds are whipping around the east coast and strange goings on with the earthquake the other day. This type of mother-nature –in-charge
activity can cause a gypsy to batten down the shutters on the wagon and hitch the pony up and head for the hills to another camp!

Sometimes, this is the best you can do! But most times you are stuck and need not worry about the “booth”! There I said, it!

Yes, you can make yourself crazy over something that is completely out of your or anyone else’s control. My particular incident was a flood in California that hit our convention center after setup of course. Luckily it wasn’t a violent flood, just significant rain in a short amount of time and an overflowing stream that turned into a river by the end of it.

Best advice I can give to you gypsies is make sure you know if your company has insurance, because often it is a huge tangle of “who-done-it”? or rather “who-pay-it”? The facility looks to the organizer who looks to your company and get out your camera, everything will need pictures with a date and time for the claims folks.

If you have to pack and ship ruined items, do it, even if you have to go out and invest in a temporary crate or container. I was lucky in that my exhibit house had a contact close to the show and they had an older crate they sold me for $200.00 and I packed the pieces in even though they were not salvageable, and I was glad I did; when the auditor came out the first thing he asked was, did I even try to salvage the pieces. When he saw it was a total loss he worked much better with us. I had to go through my organizations insurance company and they battled it out with the other two but it took months and tons of paperwork to get it all resolved. The larger the
organization the more difficult you can expect the process to be; so find out
before you set foot out of that wagon so you know what to expect should
mother-nature decide to shift her weight and cause the variety of natural disasters.

Keep safe out there gypsies, get out of the storm(s)/quakes and stop worrying about your LCD, literature, or booth! I know how you are-those are the things that are supposed to be under your control. Not this time chickadees… head for the hills, run for cover, and take those sales gypsies with you!